Pedestrians walk past the Peshawar central jail where Pakistani surgeon Shakeel Afridi, who worked for US intelligence, was moved after the verdict by tribal justice system of Khyber district, part of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt, in Peshawar on May 23, 2012. Afridi, recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden, on May 23 was sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason, officials said. In January, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for US intelligence by collecting DNA to verify bin Laden's presence and expressed concern about Pakistan's treatment of him. AFP PHOTO / A. MAJEEDA. MAJEED/AFP/GettyImages

Photo: A. Majeed, AFP/Getty Images

Pedestrians walk past the Peshawar central jail where Pakistani...

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This photo taken on July 9, 2010 shows Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi taken in Pakistani tribal area of Jamrud in Khyber region. Pakistani doctor Afridi, who helped the U. S. track down Osama bin Laden, was sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday for conspiring against the state, officials said. (AP Photo/Qazi Rauf)

The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden was sentenced Wednesday to 33 years in prison for treason in an administrative action under colonial-era laws that avoided a public trial.

The move brought condemnation in Washington, where officials had been hoping to win freedom for Dr. Shakil Afridi, whom Pakistani intelligence agents detained three weeks after the May 2, 2011, U.S. Special Forces raid in the northern town of Abbottabad that ended in bin Laden's death.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, called the verdict "shocking and outrageous" in a statement.

"What Dr. Afridi did is the furthest thing from treason. It was a courageous, heroic and patriotic act, which helped to locate the most wanted terrorist in the world - a mass murderer who had the blood of many innocent Pakistanis on his hands," the statement said. Afridi reportedly had set up a fake health program in Abbottabad, sending health workers door to door to vaccinate residents for hepatitis B, in an effort to get DNA samples from the house where the CIA suspected bin Laden lived.

American officials were never sure that bin Laden was in the home, to which they had traced a key al Qaeda courier. Afridi's work, carried out in the weeks leading up to the raid, was an important part of the CIA's attempts to verify that bin Laden was in the Abbottabad house before mounting a risky operation to kill him in another country. It remains unclear whether Afridi's efforts gained any useful information.

U.S. officials suspect that Afridi had been tortured in custody, a claim that Pakistani military officials have angrily denied.

The manner in which Afridi's case was handled is sure to inflame U.S. opinion. An official in Pakistan's tribal area tried the doctor under the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation, which was imposed when Pakistan was a British colony. There's no judge, and an employee of the local government oversees the process. The law gives that official the power to declare a suspect guilty and impose a sentence that can even sanction other members of a defendant's tribe.

Had his case been handled in Abbottabad, where his alleged offenses were committed, or in Islamabad, he would have been entitled to a court proceeding in which a jury would have considered his actions.